Serving Lucas, Ottawa, Sandusky and Wood Counties
John Hughes, who has spent the past 37 years managing Northwood Tax Service, plans on retiring at the end of this tax season.
“He’s good at what he does, and he's a friendly guy,” said Candy Sendelbach, who serves as the office manager and a tax preparer for Hughes. “He has a very loyal following. We still have people that started coming to see him when he worked out of his house in 1988.
“We've had to tell our clients that we're closing after this season and a lot of them are pretty heartbroken because it's generational. We've had grandparents whose kids came and now their kids are coming so it's kind of sad to know that we're leaving all these friends behind.
Hughes, who is a 1975 graduate of Lake High School where he played football, baseball and basketball, went to Penta for carpentry and originally spent those next few years in that field. When a recession hit, his uncle got him a job in 1978 as a machine operator at Libbey Glass, where he spent the next 20 years.
However, beginning in 1988, Hughes started doing taxes on the side out of his home for friends, neighbors and co-workers at Libbey Glass. He took classes at the University of Toledo and did a tax course through H&R Block before that.
“He’s just willing to go the extra mile,” Sendelbach said. “He listens to people, and they know if they give him a complicated tax situation, he'll probably be able to handle it without a problem.”
A passion for working with numbers ultimately led Hughes down his career path, but he’s ready to dial it back.
“I’m certainly going to miss my clients, I know that,” he said. “I’m not going to miss working 16 hours a day, but I'm going to miss my clients. It definitely makes me feel good (knowing that I’ve served my community this long). I was able to help a lot of people out of some bad tax situations, but at the same time, I'm ready to travel, enjoy my life and maybe go somewhere warm in the winter.”
Sendelbach estimates that Northwood Tax Service had upwards of 2,500 clients at the height of the business, and that was when they had more preparers working for them. The last couple of years have just been the two of them, and she estimates they have around 1,400 clients.
Hughes does small businesses and personal returns.
“He will do some smaller corporations and LLCs,” Sendelbach said. “We don't have many of those now as he's gotten closer to retirement. He's kind of cut some of those off so that they could get settled in with somebody new.”
After doing taxes out of his home while concurrently working at Libbey Glass, Hughes built up enough of a client base to move into the tax business full-time, opening his first brick-and-mortar office for Northwood Tax Service, which began operation in December 1997 adjacent to Freeway Restaurant in Oregon.
After Freeway closed, and the plaza was going to be torn down, Hughes moved to his current location at Woodway Plaza at 3401 Woodville Road in 2016.
“They gave us 30 days to leave, and I had to hurry up and find a place and move over here,” he said.
Another reason for Hughes in the decision to retire was Sendelbach initially deciding she wants to retire.
“I can't do it without her,” he said. “We were both working an awful lot of hours with two of us, and I sure can't do this by myself, so I figured it was time.”
When tax season isn’t in session, Hughes said the office has remained open four hours per day on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
“Just so people can come in, pick things up, get questions answered or drop something off,” Hughes said. “Then we have four-day weekends in case we want to go out of town or something. It gives us time for little getaways.”
During tax season though, which encompasses between 13-14 weeks of the year, Hughes works seven days per week. From Monday through Friday, he does one client per hour from 9 a.m. through 8 p.m. On Saturdays, he goes from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sundays are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
“He's always at the office by nine o'clock in the morning,” Sendelbach said. “Most of the time he has a client at nine, and he doesn't come in early. He gets every last bit of sleep he could possibly get.”
With those hours, Sendelbach said doing taxes is a form of fun for Hughes, but he enjoys other things, such as supporting the University of Toledo women’s basketball team.
Hughes and Sendelbach were two of the original founding members of the Lady Rockets Fan Club. He’s still a fan, and he really enjoys the new head coach, Ginny Boggess, who took over for long-time coach Tricia Cullop prior to this past season.
“I love her,” Hughes said. “She is wonderful. I thought I was going to miss Tricia Cullop, but boy I really love Ginny. The players really love her, too.”
When the office does close for good, Hughes plans on getting some sleep.
“At least the first two days,” he said. “Then, we’re going to take some vacations. My wife and I are going to go to Branson in June, and we're going to go to Shipshewana.”
A final day for the office hasn’t been set just yet, but it’s coming.
“We have to clean out the office and sell everything,” Hughes said. “That’s going to take some time.”
